


The Esteemed Mr Eames (After The Talented Mr Ripley)

by apiphile



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Flashbacks, Gen, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, protagonist is a liar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-10
Updated: 2010-08-10
Packaged: 2017-10-11 00:57:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/106461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eames lies a lot, a lot. Character study.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Esteemed Mr Eames (After The Talented Mr Ripley)

The Esteemed Mr Eames has made a study of the art and practice of deceit. He is a very accomplished liar, and this, in itself, is also a lie.

People lie in different ways, but they are also always careful to conceal the truth within themselves, much like a totem kept in a pocket or hidden up a sleeve. Once the truth is abandoned or forgotten the lie ceases to be a lie and becomes delusion, bullshit, or truth itself depending on what lie is being told.

A lover who no longer loves may lie to herself but mostly to the other about how passionately she still feels; the words and tone of her voice will be pitch-perfect but her movements mechanical, her focus not quite right; the lie is in her fingers and her skin, the lie is evident when she doesn't lie in the same positions she once adopted at night.

The Esteemed Mr Eames knows this; and he considers it a triumph that he has acquired it as a truth rather than abandoned it to the prison of hurts that hollows out everyone's chest from time to time; he considers it a triumph, albeit a bitter one.

People leak the truth through their phrasing and habits; they may speak German but think English, walk crippled but speak able, or act queer but focus straight with their lovely lying eyes drifting from the alleged object of their affections to the hip and leg of the lady they truly adore. Someone's sister, say.

A suitor who suits better the sex that is fairer may lie to those he seeks to deceive but he'll slip up sooner or later when the right set of chromosomes sends its pheromones towards his lungs. The lie is in the wavering glance and the shift of his legs and the way his nostrils round out like his dilating pupils, and his tutee can see this as easily as he could see the trained-away flush of skin and the breathing that has been carefully measured to hide.

The Esteemed Mr Eames may not have appreciated being taken for a ride, and his sister may have appreciated it even less, but at least he learned a valuable and replicable lesson when it came to lessening the tells of his own truth-evasion.

He has made an acute study of deception; The Esteemed Mr Eames may not always have _wanted_ to, but he has been afforded a good many chances to learn, and those who do not pay attention are those who must repeat history like so many little amnesiac time-travellers.

Like dreamers.

* * *

"Talented my arse."

He turns the TV off.

* * *

The forger, of course – or rather the Forger, capital F, for a title awarded in recognition of excellent work – is in itself a forgery. The liar is, admits the Esteemed Mr Eames while focusing his energy on a hand of cards which he is carefully cultivating to lose, also a lie.

The thing about losing yourself completely in a stolen identity, as surely as a sailor loses himself in troubled seas, or a Grecian hero in his labyrinth, is that when the time comes to escape one needs a guide. A _red_ thread, not a dull one. A brighter lighthouse.

"And no natural persona is quite strong enough," Eames says as he tweaks the corners of his cards in the appearance of meditation.

Ariadne catches his eye and hikes a thin eyebrow. His allusion to her has not gone unheeded, and she seems needled.

"Well, you know how people are," he draws out the words until they become a drawl. "No matter the nuances of face, movement, and vocal tics –"

"Stop using my accent," Arthur says. He is not in the game; he is not at home to being borrowed for demonstrations, and so Eames is enthralled. Arthur must be _stolen_, which is exciting and interesting and involves flattening Eames' full fat lips into the disapproving geometry of Arthur's irritation. He has, Eames thinks, such a mathematical mouth.

"– They're fun to impersonate but you can never fully occupy them," Eames says. Lies. He lays down a card. It _was_ the four of diamonds in his hand but it's the King of Clubs on the tabletop. It's remarkable what a little loose-handed smiling lie can achieve when it comes to raising one's status. "They're too dull."

"Eames," says Yusuf, "stop doing that with your mouth."

Copying reads as mockery too often.

"I seem to have won," Eames says, and his surprise is genuine, and his smile is stolen. He reaches into his pocket and feels the rim of the poker chip; it is unmarred, each little groove exact and measured and smooth and correct.

Across the table Ariadne's frown fades into another, deeper frown as she mirrors his movement and gropes for her totem. "Whose dream is it?"

* * *

The Esteemed Mr Eames is the best in the business. He is the pinnacle of the profession. The foxiest most fictitious of forgers; he is the best there is, but he is not the best that he _could_ be.

"Why?" Cobb is as still as a statue and as tense as a kite line.

"If you want to be perfect in your deception, you have to believe the lie yourself." Arthur is not invited to the conversation, but Eames accepts that the success of this job is vital to all its components and that any failing of his is a danger to the team; Arthur is anal and Arthur is a perfectionist. He needs to know how Eames might fuck up, but the glance that passes between them tells him everything he needs to know.

It's not _Eames_ fucking up that's got them all on edge.

* * *

When he was five he had a recurring nightmare about the attic of the house he grew up in. In his dream, smoke began pouring down through the cracks around the loft door, and snuck into the ceilings of every room, filling the air with danger and his lungs with pain.

He would sneak into the attic, which in his dream had dimensions that would have dwarfed Salisbury Cathedral, and find at the centre of the fire a boy who looked just like him, holding a lit match and smiling. _What a terrible child_, his mother would say. _Why have you done this to us?_

The Esteemed Mr Eames has carefully excised from his memory the manner in which his fear of the attic, or at least his reports of nightmares concerning it, was brought to an end. There are black rectangles of censorship over everyone's lives, he reasons, and no one knows enough to be interested in extracting his from the shoebox under the floorboards of the shed by the abandoned pigsties, where he keeps his.

* * *

"It's based on the anatomy of the nautilus," Ariadne says, pointing with a fountain pen to the blocky and post-apocalyptic third level architectural plan. It is imperative that Eames pay attention because it is his dream, and he is responsible for the layout and consistency of the dream. "And the Terebridae."

Eames gives her his finest look of polite incomprehension.

"They're types of mollusc," she says impatiently, "we're taught to take inspiration from the natural world, and some of the best labyrinths are the ones designed by nature."

"Ah yes," Eames says with a smirk, "I remember I saw this video about duck vaginas –"

She hits him in the upper arm with the pen. It's more of a tap. "Pay attention."

The structure of the building is a spiral, a spiral with connotations of Soviet Futurism and a system of air vents which seem like an egregious waste of brain space to Eames, but which Ariadne insists are absolutely non-negotiable parts of the design. He has an acute sense of premonition; some day this woman will bully a wealthy consortium into accepting whatever vision she has for a building, for a complex, and somewhere in Dubai or Tokyo or the west coast of America a staggering daydream of construction will unfold like an enormous flower and make whichever city it lands in famous.

He envies her then, her imagination and her drive, her certainty. Ariadne has no doubts about who she is.

"Duck vaginas," Arthur says evenly when they break to get coffee, and Eames has white dust on his fingertips from walking his hand like a tiny avatar through the layout of the imposing hospital.

"Terribly sorry the word _cloaca_ didn't roll off my tongue as quickly as I'd hoped," Eames shields the French press with his body, absorbing with corners of his eyes the way that no matter how casually he dressed, Arthur's neatness pervaded like blood through gauze, and no matter how smartly _he_ layered on clothes, when Eames played Eames in the great theatrical production of his life, the scruffiness seeped upward like sewage.

"Duck vaginas," Arthur repeats, and though his face and voice are still there is something in the way his eyes move that tells Eames he is unfeasibly tickled by the phrase.

"It doesn't seem like a very effective maze," Eames says, pouring himself coffee. "There aren't any dead ends." He doesn't need to look at the realignment of Arthur's centre of gravity or listen for the change in his breathing to know that Ariadne has come into earshot. It's not so much the recognition of a change in his environment on a conscious or subconscious level as it is the application of Sod's Law. He raises his voice. "Of course it doesn't have any dead ends, that's because it's a _maze_ and not a _labyrinth_ like the other levels. We're not trying to keep him out of the centre but funnel him towards it."

Arthur says, "I know," with a hint of impatience.

"Duck vaginas, darling," Eames says, and presses a coffee into Ariadne's hand as he turns.

* * *

"Talented my _arse_," he says, picking up the broadsword and pointing it at the first of the projections.

"Hmm," Arthur says, from his left.

"Hmm," Eames echoes, and fires the rail gun he has just decided will be more practical, appropriateness and actual physics be damned.

* * *

The Esteemed Mr Eames cheats at every game he plays. He considers it a matter of good sense, since everyone he has ever played with has made it a point of policy to cheat _him_.

"So you lie first because the other person is probably lying to you," Ariadne concludes, laying down a full hand, two-to-eight, in hearts. "Rummy."

"That's the size of it," Eames says, clicking his tongue. He sits back on his chair and watches Arthur and Saito deliberate over their hands; Cobb is testing new concentrations with Yusuf. Arthur will probably win, the slow flutter of his eyelashes as he ignores Saito completely says he is confident and clean and clear in his thoughts. The bastard.

There's no need for untruth in this game, and yet they're all lying, with their cards on the table.

"What happens when they're not lying to you?" Ariadne never rearranges her scarf when she's talking to him, or to Arthur, or Yusuf, or Saito. She only shuffles it about when she's talking to Cobb, or more accurately when she's looking at him like a Chinese puzzle box that she hasn't solved yet.

"Everyone's hiding something," Eames smiles, slipping his frustration carefully behind a different mask, sliding the desire to truncate this line of conversation under a different card. The smile is a lie. The sniff of disapproval is Arthur's, the way he sits up is taken directly from Ariadne. He feminises his posture, raises an eyebrow. "Or there'd be no need for psycho-oneirology."

"Don't do that," she says, and she has left the game before he can count all the way up to ten; he watches her walk, the way she steps like a boy and not a woman, a specific springy step like a gymnast tamed, a kite grounded.

He's aware he's projecting.

* * *

"I can be anything you want me to be," is by now just a sick joke, but it's all the sicker for being true.

Oh well.

If they'd never left, he'd never have learnt. And now he really can be anything they want, but he's never going to try to please _them_ again.

Eames spins his poker chip and wears his sister's smile for variety.

* * *

By the time they are on architectural run-through number forty, he has mastered every last twitch and tic; she quirks her mouth _so_, holds her head _thus_, moves her hand like _that_. And he is certain of the architecture here on level one, Yusuf's dream with the city streets and the bridge and every car and face. Everyone's projections are by now recognisable as their own, and Eames would probably know Yusuf's mother if he met her next week.

He's as certain of the city as he is of the hairs on the back of his hand, and he knows the back of his hand like the proverbial and recursive. So he might as well have a moment of fun.

Right?

It takes two turns to divest himself of his colleagues and one dive behind a parked Toyota to slip a fresh face over his own and press a new gait onto his new feet like a pair of shoes. He finds his hips and hair and refrains from adjusting the scarf around his neck.

It takes one short corner to encounter Arthur.

"I saw you looking," he says.

"You're very pretty," Arthur says without a trace of shame. "I didn't mean to offend you." He doesn't waste words, of course, because he is Arthur, and that wouldn't be expedient. He is so fucking precise.

"You should do something about it instead of just staring," he says, his mouth shaping vowels in the way that the grand character of the Esteemed Mr Eames, Master Forger, never troubles to; they are not his cut glass and his constructed class, his English Charm.

"I wasn't sure it would be welcome," says Arthur, manners, poise and a smooth-but-seeming-sincere charm that should have melted the knees of every lucky lady in a ten mile radius. Bastard.

Eames rises up on his tip-toes and plants a soft, wet, girlish kiss on Arthur's straight-line mystery of a mouth. Arthur as he appears in his own mind thinks his mouth tastes slightly of English apple cider, and Eames approves – his own mouth is calculated to taste of the smell of someone who is not him, _au naturelle_.

"It's welcome," he says, his lips and their gloss brushing a few syllables onto Arthur's narrow lips.

He plans on beating a hasty retreat before anything can go horribly wrong, but Sod's Law makes an appearance in the form of Ariadne's voice – which he has gone to such trouble to match – drifting down their side-street like the herald of an oncoming train. It doesn't matter that her words are not comprehensible or aimed at either of them; the mere fact of her distinctive accent and cadence are enough to shatter the illusion.

"Eames," Arthur sighs, as he takes a hasty step or two back in Ariadne's canvas trainers. "That wasn't funny."

"It wasn't meant to be," he mutters, shedding his skin.

* * *

"Have you tried _being yourself_?" his sister asked, stroking his back as Eames vomited a night of disappointment and cocktails up into her toilet like the thunder of the pink-tinged bilious gods.

"Because that will _really_ appeal to them," he said, bracing himself against the porcelain with all the violent self-pity of a heartbroken (again) nineteen-year-old.

"Darling," she said, handing him a glass of water and putting her hand up to stop him smacking his head on the side of the sink, "if they don't like you for yourself, they're not worth chasing."

Eames had at the time said nothing of her divorce.

* * *

At the baggage claim, Arthur lays a hand on his upper arm to hold him back. "Good job, Eames."

"You already said that."

"Maybe I wanted to say it again." Arthur's other hand is clamped around the handle of a suitcase which has no identifying features whatsoever; Eames supposes that this is precisely how he identifies it.

"And do you?" Eames asks, wearing one of his Esteemed Mr Eames smirks, a smile that pulls the fat thick lips he owns into a knowing half-bow.

"No," Arthur says, "I was actually going to say you're very good at being Eames."

_It's an act,_ Eames fails to say.

"And the rest of that sentence?" he asks instead, his own suitcase with its little golden fleur-de-lys patterns sitting just far enough into the path of passing passengers that it will sooner or later trip one of them and, hopefully, take the burning spotlight of Arthur's precise and pointed stare off his face.

"And if you feel like coming and being Eames around me again … I'd welcome it." Arthur hands him a piece of paper. The name of a hotel in town, a room number, and Arthur's perfect, blunt capital letters. He's almost surprised they don't have serifs on them.

"It'll be good practice," Eames agrees, and he consciously disassembles the smirk for long enough to let a real smile and the tip of a tooth show.


End file.
